Five Things We Learned In Corrie This Week

Stripped for your pleasure.  Every year (pandemic permitting) ITV clears the schedules so it can strip a week of shiny floored showbiz extravaganzas.  Normally, this is Britain's Got Talent, the incomprehensibly popular programme where singing grannies, infant dance troupes and magicians battle for the honour of boring the backside off Prince William at the Royal Variety Performance.  This year they went with The Masked Dancer, a programme about Eddie "The Eagle" Edwards prancing about in a rubber chicken costume; looking at the viewing figures ITV may have been better off showing a week of Government Information Films and European cartoons.  Anyway, what this means is that Corrie loses its traditional slot and is instead wedged into the 9 o'clock slot.  On top of this, because it expects to inherit a huge audience from the programme before, the network insists that it have a series of high octane, thrill a second episodes that will hook viewers who are too lazy to turn over to the Sewing Bee on BBC One.  Usually someone will get murdered, or a corpse will be dug up, or a psychopath will get their just desserts, or if all else fails, they'll destroy another bit of the set and wipe out some of the dead wood in the cast.

Personally I'm always disappointed they don't embrace the post-watershed timeslot and go full 18 certificate.  It could be like Hollyoaks: After Hours, or when Brookside was in a graveyard slot in its dying days and they stopped caring.  Make Alina and Tyrone have a full nude sex scene.  Blow Dev's head off in close-up, with Kensingon Gore all over the digestives.  Make Rita eff and jeff throughout.  Anyway, this year, in the absence of any explosions, they decided to simply fill the show with cliffhangers.  All the cliffhangers.  All the time.  Every ad break was preceded by a shocked expression, and the end of every episode was a revelation that would rock the Street.  I wonder what people who don't watch Corrie normally think about all this?  Are there people who get hooked on the constant nerve shredding drama of BGT Week, and then get disappointed when they tune in the following week and it's Ken returning his library books and Tracy having amusing problems with a delivery of hydrangeas?  This year Corrie did its best but it felt a little cobbled together.  It took place over the course of one very long day, a day so long Adam and Sarah went out to dinner twice, and it was more like a lot of plots were wedged together without any real cohesion.  Still, they can't all be blockbusters, and I look forward to next year when, I don't know, a hellmouth opens up in the back of Roy's Rolls.

HAVE IT!  Look, I'm not against camp in Coronation Street.  In fact, I am violently pro it.  If it were up to me the show would be six episodes a week of Mary in outrageous hats and Sally swapping snobbish barbs with the neighbours.  What I like though is consistency.  If it's absurd, make it all absurd; if it's dramatic, go with that.  It meant that I couldn't really join in with the hysterical glee of Twitter homosexuals over Sharon tasering Jenny.  I mean, on one level, yes, it was very funny; Jenny's shocked expression, Sharon looking like Dirty Harry, that gratuitous "have it!".  But it came at the climax of an episode where Jenny put together that Sharon was a criminal, a kidnapper, and could very possibly be about to hurt Rita; the rest of the story was played absolutely straight.  It didn't help that the tasering was immediately forgotten about.  We didn't even get a doctor in Wethy General saying "it appears that your collapse was caused by ten thousand volts up your jacksie, Mrs Connor", as Jenny checked herself out within minutes and moved onto the far more important matter of her failing marriage, presumably with her back screaming in agony the whole time.  It also raises the question - did Sharon have that taser in her handbag this whole time?  Because that could've solved her a lot of problems.  Instead of sending Dev to the shop for booze, she could've simply knocked him unconscious and rifled through Aadi's XBox, and she needn't have sat through that boring documentary with Sam.  One zap and he'd have been out of it and she could've put on Bridgerton instead.

I'm not sure if this was the last we'll get to see of Sharon; driving off in a white van seemed like a pretty anticlimactic way for her to leave the show.  It was at least nice to see her get one last interrogation in before she left, sharing a coffee with Toyah and asking her all about Leanne in a way that was incredibly suspicious and unnecessary.  I suppose there's still Harvey's trial, which can't come soon enough, and then we can put this whole sorry experience behind us.

Nobody cares about Sam.  Remember a few episodes back, when a distraught Natasha said she'd have to personally oversee Sam from now on to make sure he was safe?  She was going to home school him, and look after him, and not let those awful Platt-Tilsleys put him in danger again.  Well, that resolve lasted about eight minutes, as we discovered on Monday that David is babysitting him again and Natasha was nowhere to be seen.  Worse, he was out in the alley smacking gunmen over the head with his telescope while David was presumably indoors eating his lunch in front of Doctors.  (Incidentally, isn't it unfortunate that someone seems to have blocked up the alleyway round the back of the posh houses just as Gary tried to use it to escape?  I reckon it was Sally.  When Elaine was staying with Yasmeen she decided to put as many obstacles as possible in the way of her nipping round to see them).

David's neglect of his nephew extended to him letting him play unsupervised in the back garden even though - as we all know - there's a flipping great hole in it.  Yes there are some barriers in the way, but it would only take Sam spotting a trilobite fossil in the mud for him to lean in too far and plummet to his death.  I notice David isn't letting Max and Lily play out there on their own, but then again, they're completely absent from the show.  I do wonder about the guardians of little Jude Riordan, who plays Sam.  All the other child actors have been entirely removed from the set during the pandemic; we've got the odd glimpse of Hope and Ruby in recent weeks, but Joseph and the quads are invisible, and Harry may as well not exist.  Meanwhile Jude's mum and dad are all "no, please put our son on the show, in fact the more he's in it the better."  Is he the canary in the mine?  If he doesn't die of the coronavirus will they deem it safe for more important child actors like Liam and Jack to return to filming?  They'd best hurry up, because Kevin confirmed this week that Jack is still meant to be ten years old, and at the rate puberty was hitting Kyran Bowes he'll have a full beard when he comes back.

Drink up.  I know she's grieving and everything but can we take a moment to question Abi's judgement?  She conspired with a sixteen year old girl to send her into the home of a man she believed murdered her son to get her to drug him and rifle through his possessions.  That all seems a bit much.  The alternative may have been braining him with a bottle but at least that would've been all Abi.  Obviously the dose didn't work properly, because Asha is not a qualified anaesthetist , and the drug came from a man with a bumbag in the Alleyway of Doom rather than a pharmacy.  It was probably ninety per cent chalk and Imodium.  I am impressed at how quickly Abi was able to get hold of him - is there a drug dealer equivalent of Just Eat?  Delivery within twenty minutes or your smack is free.

For a terrifying moment in Friday's episode I thought they were going to kill Corey and have Nina, Asha and Abi hide the body and send us down that plot hole again.  Thankfully, common sense prevailed, and they instead called the authorities.  Hopefully they'll give up this whole angels of vengeance kick and let the authorities deal with Corey - Craig isn't on the case so there's a good chance he might actually get arrested.  I want Asha to have a nice storyline for once, one where she doesn't sob and scream for fifteen episodes.  Have her team up with Aadi being adorable instead.

Misters over sisters.  Tina O'Brien is a 37 year old mother of two and I still can't take her seriously as a grown adult.  I don't think she's aged since 2004.  Every time she wanders around in her posh suits talking about figures and profits she looks like Entrepreneur Barbie has somehow come to life and is tottering round the cobbles.  It's especially bad when she's in a scene with Carla, who looks like she could run a small country without mussing up her hair.  I did enjoy the two of them working together to reclaim their stock, not least because we learned that Carla is handy with a crowbar; that woman is always revealing new layers.

The détente didn't last long, of course, and soon the two women were bawling at one another in the factory office, bringing up their disastrous pasts as they fought over Adam's liver.  Poor Adam and Peter seem to be an afterthought in all this, with neither of them seeming especially bothered about the operation at all, while the women in their life hiss and spit at one another.  Carla implied that (a) Sarah-Lou is rubbish in bed and (b) that she'd drop Adam like a stone if Gary fluttered his ginger eyelashes at her.  I can't speak to the first fact, obviously, but if the second one is true her window of opportunity may have just closed.

Maria has allowed Gary back into her life and it was abundantly clear that her mattress was going to get a thorough working out.  Apparently, chat about the animals at Bristol Zoo really gets her going; perhaps zoophilia is the next big "issue" the show will be tackling, and Gary and Maria will be arrested in a state of undress in the hyena pen at Knowsley Safari Park.  Gary moving back in with Maria means that Zack will continue to be fatherless, but on the plus side he can spend more time with Liam and... the other one.  Jim?  Joey?  Something like that.

The author is going to be sad to see Johnny and Jenny split up, mainly because he likes the fact that there's a couple on the show called Johnny and Jenny.  They sound like a Ladybird book.  Join him in shouting "you can't just gloss over the fact that you slept with Liz McDonald!" on Twitter @merseytart.

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